Google’s headquarters in Zurich has a massage room, aquarium and a slide to deliver engineers smoothly and quickly to the canteen.
Deloitte’s Amsterdam office was designed with one empty room on each floor for employees to put what they wanted in them – most have gone for games such as table football.
At LinkedIn’s Californian HQ there is a music room, stocked with keyboards, drums, guitars and audio equipment. And allowing employees to bring their pets to work is increasingly common. So when did our offices turn into playgrounds, and does this represent the new way of working?
Technological advances mean that staff can avoid the drudgery of commuting and work from home, coffee shops, or any number of exotic locations. So some companies are working extra-hard to make their offices more attractive places to be. A recent report from US software giant Citrix forecast that by 2017, some 50% of businesses would have a mobile working policy, and by 2020, 70% of people would work away from the office as often as they worked at a desk.
“Offices are expensive and office space will decline,” says Citrix vice president Jacqueline de Rojas. This is partly due to bosses realising not all jobs need to be done from an office, but also because employees are increasingly demanding a better work-life balance, she adds.
That doesn’t mean that the office will die, though.
“Offices will become places of collaboration and connection because culturally we need touch points as we are social animals,” she says. The ‘super-desk’
Citrix has installed “genius benches” at its London headquarters – essentially higher and longer shared desks that come with stools, not chairs.
There are also moveable desks, like the ones at headphone maker Skullcandy’s office in Zurich. The desks can be configured to work individually or collaboratively, fitting together like puzzle pieces.
Meanwhile, marketing firm Barbarian Group has created a “super-desk” at its New York office which sits up to 170 people, and includes archways where staff can go for private chats.
And Lego has taken hot-desking to the next level at its London and Singapore offices, introducing a system called activity-based working, which means that no-one has a fixed desk any more.
Space is divided into flexible work zones with no fixed seating and no offices for managers. Employees who leave their workspace for more than one-and-a-half hours need to take all their stuff with them.
Lego even has a department for “new ways of working” and, says senior director Sophie Patrikios, the experiment has gone well.
“In our May 2016 survey, 88% of staff said they liked the choice of where to work. They get a choice of different settings to suit their activity or mood, including a quiet library, a buzzing social area with background music, comfy chairs in cosy corners or big banks of desks to share with team-mates,” she says. Offices are also getting smarter. Research firm Gartner says commercial buildings are already at the forefront of the “internet of things” revolution. Courtesy – bbc News